Abstract: With further application of compressed sensing (CS) in smart grid, research on CS application in non-invasive load monitoring (NILM) is lagging behind. For this reason, after analyzing application necessity of CS in NILM, this paper provides an outlook and exploration into the untapped application research of CS in NILM. First, three application modes of CS in NILM are proposed by comparing the principle of CS and the process of NILM. Then, based on the specific processes of those three application modes, the research directions in theory and suitable scenarios in engineering for each application mode are prospected. On this basis, the key technologies that need to be addressed in the application of CS in NILM are mainly discussed from two aspects which are CS elements and load analysis. The research ideas for improving CS elements such as measurement matrix, sparse basis and reconstruction algorithm adapted to NILM are deeply discussed, while the implementation idea of load analysis methods under CS framework such as event detection, load decomposition, load identification and feature extraction are proposed. The work done in this paper aims to realize the preliminary exploration of the application of CS in NILM, which provides guidance for follow-up research.